The Song of Moses

With “children of Israel,” the line is a strange oddity — why would the number of nations match Israel’s population? But with “sons of God,” a pattern emerges: God assigned each nation a heavenly administrator. Verse 9 then creates a deliberate contrast: the other nations go to spiritual beings, but Israel is God’s own possession. The older reading makes the structure of the whole passage click.

Ancient texts outside the Bible fill in the picture. The Book of Jubilees (ch. 15) says God placed spirits over all nations but kept Israel as his own. The Dead Sea Scrolls preserve a fragment (4QDeutj) with the “sons of God” reading. The seventy nations of Genesis 10 appear to correspond to seventy spiritual administrators — an arrangement that Deuteronomy 4:19–20 and 29:26 both reference: God “allotted” the stars (heavenly beings) to other nations, but kept Israel for himself.

Romans 1:24 describes what happened next: God “gave them over” — the nations, under their spiritual governors, descended into idolatry and injustice. The call of Abraham (Genesis 12:3, immediately after Babel) is the beginning of God’s counter-move: one family to reclaim what was lost.

Sources: Jubilees 15:31 • 4QDeutj (Dead Sea Scrolls) • 1 Enoch 89:59 • Deut 4:19–20, 29:26 • Romans 1:24

Israel wasn’t chosen because God played favorites. Israel was chosen as a vehicle. The promise to Abraham was never just about Abraham — it was “through you, all nations will be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). The Old Testament isn’t the story of one tribe’s special relationship with God while everyone else is ignored. It’s the story of a rescue plan, launched through one family, aimed at reclaiming what all the others had lost under broken spiritual administrators.

This is a divine courtroom scene. God presides over “the great assembly” — and the beings on trial are called “gods” and “sons of the Most High” in verse 6. These are the same figures Deuteronomy 32:8 describes as assigned over nations. Their crime: they judged unjustly and showed partiality to the wicked. Their sentence: they will “die like men.” This is the governing failure the rest of human history reflects — not just bad human leaders, but corrupt spiritual ones behind them.

The Song of Moses has bookends. It opens in verse 8 with the assignment: the sons of God are placed over the nations. It closes in verse 43 with a command: those same sons of God are told to bow down and worship. The frame that disappears when the lines are removed is the entire cosmic arc of the song — the story moves from authority granted to authority submitted.

The nations that were apportioned to spiritual beings are now called to rejoice alongside Israel. The rebellion implied in Psalm 82 is not the end of the story. The song ends in submission — not defeat, but reclamation.

Hebrews 1:6 quotes this verse directly: “Let all God’s angels worship him” — and applies it to Jesus. The author of Hebrews saw in this verse a conclusion that the sons of God story was always pointing toward.

This framework can be misused — so name the guardrail up front. The claim here is not that any particular country, political party, or ethnic group is in league with spiritual forces. That road leads to demonizing people instead of understanding them.

What the text suggests is different: that systemic evil is larger than individuals. Psalm 82 puts cosmic governors on trial — not human pawns. The pattern the apostle Paul picks up is: “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world” (Ephesians 6:12). People are not our real enemy. The systems behind the systems are.